Talk with Colin Xander, North America Turnaround Director of INEOS Styrolution

Collin Zander on Fixing the Turnaround Crisis: From Nuclear Discipline to Real-Time Maintenance Insights

This week at KEWAZO, we welcomed a guest we were genuinely pleased to host. Colin Xander, North America Turnaround Director at INEOS Styrolution, sat down with Artem Kuchukov, KEWAZO’s CEO for a wide-ranging conversation on turnarounds (TA) and the practical realities that determine whether they succeed or stall.

00:00:17 Introducing Colin

00:00:38 Colin’s recent charity work through Promise for the North

00:03:31 Comparison between overhaul in the Navy and the one in the chemical industry

00:08:09 the lack of accurate data in Chemical industry

00:12:09 Lessons learned need to be micro

00:14:34 Scope management and risk handling 

00:18:03 Tracking productivity using Power BI

00:25:26 Electronic Permitting

00:35:21 Cost control and scaffolding cost management

00:44:02 Why are past work plans not reused?

01:00:00 Labour shortage and industrial crisis

01:04:53 The keys to success are “culture” and 'decision-making'

Starting with a comparison between naval overhauls and chemical industry turnarounds, the discussion moved swiftly into the trust gap created by inaccurate data, the value of micro, field-ready lessons learned, and the day to day mechanics of scope and risk management. From Power BI driven productivity tracking and electronic permitting to scaffolding cost control, the exchange stayed grounded in the levers that teams can actually pull.

A question, why past work plans often aren’t reused, opened up a deeper point about organisational memory, standardisation, and execution.

The takeaway was clear: beyond tools and methods, the real differentiators are culture and decision-making who decides, on what basis, and how consistently those decisions are carried through.